Describing something as average is typically innocuous. But sometimes it can be deceiving. Take a look at the definition of average and you'll see a typical amount , or common , ordinary . When it comes to numbers and data it is also tied to what is called the arithmetic mean (sometimes just mean for short) -- which is adding up a bunch of values and dividing by the number of values you have. Key questions here: When are these ideas in alignment and when does it fail? To help get to the bottom of this, at least from a statistical point of view, is to first talk about resistant statistics -- which are summarizations of data that are not highly influenced by individual values. Let's also have a quick reminder of the median or value that splits the data set into an upper and lower half when the data is ordered. The mean of a data set is not resistant to extreme values, while the median is, and w...
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